Stimulation Clicker

[btown]

The real hidden gem here is the hilarious 40 minute mermaid-themed true crime podcast parody that you'll only hear a portion of if you progress quickly. As far as I can tell, it's fully custom-made for this game? Can't find any references to the characters online.

https://stimulation-clicker.neal.fun/ sounds/true-crime.mp3 - it's hosted on Cloudflare, but even so I don't want to cost OP significant bandwidth, so join the two strings above for the direct link.

"Aww, he was all cat 'n tonic when he first saw her." An absolute classic. I would do anything to know more about how this came to exist.

[383toast]

for people that don't want to click a lot,

paste in "setInterval(() => document.querySelector('.main-btn').click(), 20)" into the browser console, clicks 50x per second for you :)

[jml7c5]

Reminds me a bit of The Onion's "A Very Fatal Murder" podcast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder

[anon7000]

I noticed the podcast at one point mentions neal.fun, so definitely custom made!

[ehsankia]

Was the mukbang also custom?

[kregasaurusrex]

Thanks for the direct link- this makes understimulated listening much easier & it was easy to miss within the cacophony of everything else.

[clgeoio]

This is an amazing podcast - I'm glad I took the time to listen

[joseda-hg]

It's weird, it seems like it's the only custom made thing on the game, why only that one?

[silisili]

Absolutely. Reminded me of all the effort GTA spent on radio, to much fanfare.

The entire production value is fantastic. Glad to see Neal expanding. This is only a half step away from something less jokey, and more marketable.

If that's the path he chooses, of course. But judging by his smiling face in the center of it all wearing a poor fitting crown, I think he's just in it for the lulz. And I may respect that even more.

[eleveriven]

I started listening to the podcast at first, but then it just became impossible. Really awesome!

[zdc1]

I finished the game without cheating. I felt like a frog being slowly boiled (and it really does feel like you're boiling at the end). It's quite the journey...

I love how everything here isn't even farfetched. It's just standard YouTube and TikTok content. The red notification bubbles were also a nice touch, I felt myself really drawn to those, and if I think back, I guess that's the earliest example I can recall of where these patterns all started: Facebook's little red notification bubble

[Petersipoi]

As far as clickers go, finishing this game without cheating is very easy. Only takes like 20-30 min. But nonetheless, it was enjoyable. Really regretted clicking the subway surfer wormhole button. Luckily that was right at the end.

[drivers99]

Jonathan Blow had a great (imho) rant about those type of notifications that someone clipped from one of his live streams. (Warning: strong language.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9nmCIrs7HI

[echelon]

> I felt like a frog being slowly boiled

This game is an excellent simulation of what ADHD feels like, especially if you're putting off multiple critical tasks.

[navane]

if people ask me how my weekend was, i can unironically send them this site; this is my weekend condensed in 30 minutes

[vasco]

MSN Messenger had addicting bubbles way before

[eleveriven]

I wanted to gouge my eyes out hahaha. The ending cutscene made up for it all.

[eigenvalue]

Wow, that was amazing. This is honestly a better piece of contemporary art (in terms of making you think about modern life and what is happening to our environment, the impact on ourselves, our kids, etc.) than most of what you might see at a fancy art gallery or a contemporary art museum in NYC.

[echelon]

Neal has continually outdone himself with every single release. Everything he makes is a labor of love and is so special and deserving of attention. From the factual stuff like "The Size of Space" and "Deep Sea", to the more amusing "Absurd Trolly Problems", "The Password Game", and so on. It's all so good and feels like a gift to the internet.

Stimulation Clicker's social commentary has to the best thus far. I know click games are a thing, but to combine that mechanic with a parody of the state of the modern attention economy is just pure art.

Neal, if you're reading HN, you rock. Please know how appreciative we are.

[alanbernstein]

For the live-action, logical conclusion of this concept, watch HYPER-REALITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

[marifjeren]

You'll never see games at fancy art galleries or contemporary art museums in NYC because games are too accessible

[diggan]

> This is honestly a better piece of contemporary art (in terms of making you think about modern life and what is happening to our environment, the impact on ourselves, our kids, etc.)

Zooming out, I think games in general is in a much better position to do this, as a medium, compared to the alternatives TV, movies and music.

I guess mainly because it's interactive, but it also feels like it can be broader than the other mediums, like on one hand you have Idle/Clicker games like these, and on the other the huge blockbuster AAA games.

[eleveriven]

I haven’t even had a chance to look at the game from that perspective yet. I don’t know why, but this game has me so excited!

[anonyonoor]

I accidentally got addicted to crypto trading and made 34 million stimulation before I realized there was a "win game" button.

I guess this game is more representative than we'd like to think.

[bbno4]

I managed to cheat this by buying a bunch of DVDs and making my window as small as possible, meaning they hit the edges much more often and gained me infinity stimulation.

[xnx]

Fantastic encapsulation and commentary on the modern web and attentionspace.

There's certainly better ways to do this, but here's one way to automate 1000 clicks from the console:

  for (let i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
    document.querySelector('button.main-btn-pretty').click();
  }

Automating this art piece probably also says ... something.

[cainxinth]

> Fantastic encapsulation and commentary on the modern web and attentionspace.

This is why I quit Hearthstone even though I never spent a dime on it. I realized I had been habituated into playing it every day. I started feeling like a lab rat trained to push a button for a reward.

[jetbalsa]

a fun way is to resize the window to be super tiny and the DVD Bounce really gets going into the millions

[inglor]

Automate that bitcoin!

```

setInterval(() => { let max = 100; while(max-->0) { let price = +document.querySelector(".last-price").textContent.trim().slice(1).replace(",","").split("\n")[0]; if (price > 20000) { document.querySelector(".stock-sell").click(); } else if (price < 10000) { document.querySelector(".stock-buy").click(); } else { break; } } })

```

[dachris]

It feels like this quote from "Ready Player One" (2018 film)

"Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions, we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures"

[Eji1700]

Reminds me of a story I heard as a kid.

Short version, guy can't sleep. Someone tells him get a dog. Dog barks, still can't sleep. Well you'll also need a blah... repeat until the man has a small farm of loud animals going. Then finally "get rid of them" and suddenly it's all so quiet again.

It's pretty fascinating how much more calm everything seems when you finish/stop this game

[sharkweek]

Neal.fun keeping weird internet alive, one micro game at a time.

Other favorites:

* Absurd Trolley Problem: https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

* Password game: https://neal.fun/password-game/

[blixt]

Lovely ending, and I appreciate how short this one is. For me it really does induce some mixed feelings for what we did to the web while at the same time I really enjoyed the nostalgia.

Another game I sunk way too much time into to get to the end is Idle Loops which ends up being kind of like programming once you get deeper into it: https://dmchurch.github.io/omsi-loops/ (There are three versions, all open source on GitHub – this one is the third in the chain of forks, with the most updates)

[hiroprot]

Best way I've found to stimulate quickly, resize your window to be as small as possible, and have lots of bouncing DVDs.

[erikerikson]

For those of you loving this, a classic: https://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

[zzzzrrrt]

I was about to scoff at this and thought "Ugh, another cookie clicker", but then I started playing it. I'm glad it is quick because my head was going to explode. It is pretty damn brilliant take on today's stimuli overload. I think it is more a piece of art than a game. I was able to win quickly once I got crypto because it was bouncing from $400 to $50,000, but I almost barfed because there was SO much going on. Well done.

[dogman123]

Did anyone else get the seemingly _actual_ NordVPN that clicked through to NordVPN? Wondering if they sponsored this.

[cscheid]

Since we're all sharing clicker games, this one by Frank Lantz is a real classic: https://decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

[ArlenBales]

Unironically, if this was on Steam and monetized through their item shop, it would probably make a fortune. See banana: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2923300/Banana/

[allemagne]

This is a fun clicker game whose point seems cynical and self-defeating on multiple levels.

Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page. The stimulation torture wasn't really torture, but another level to the game.

All the content creators whose inclusion at first seems like an indictment of the kinds of internet videos that lead to addiction or overstimulation also all get a pleasant shout-out which seems silly. Are these supposed to represent what's awful about the internet?

EDIT: To hammer the dissonance home, at the end of the game we are met with a calming ocean scene that I'm guessing the average player appreciated for about thirty seconds before clicking away.

To me, this whole exercise doesn't reflect how distorted humanity has become because of technology, but of how humans refuse to look themselves in the mirror.

We want to be the kind of people who buck the mold and escape systems of control, so that we can properly enjoy things like waves of the ocean, but at any point during this game we could just open a new tab and watch the ocean on a YouTube livestream. Instead we spend an hour clicking and advancing this manic stream of chaos.

What's more human, then: calmly watching the waves crash against the beach, or clicking buttons trying to win and discover what's at the end of a silly game?

[matt3210]

Crashes on mobile chrome after about 10 minutes probably for the best

[johnneville]

i went into this expecting a quick, shallow, PoC game to make a fast point. i was rewarded as the game continued to add incredible depth, showing real care and thought. if there's one thing i can recommend, it's to read all the emails. they are hilarious and gave me the most joy. i burst out laughing while reading some which took me over my stimulation threshold and allowed me to fully embrace the absurdity of the entire thing (which i was initially playing somewhat competitively).

[seletskiy]

Don't blame me.

  setInterval(() => { [...document.querySelectorAll(".upgrade,.loot-box-target,button")].map((e) => e.click()); }, 50)

[rglover]

I thought it was insane just hand-clicking but this legitimately made it overwhelming to the point where I had to close the tab.

[sss111]

ah this actually speedruns the game, brilliant